Solutions Architect

The Solutions Architect will provide architectural leadership, guide engineering decisions, and shape long-term technology strategy, focusing on cloud infrastructure, DevOps practices, and system evolution., We are seeking a highly experienced Solutions Architect to provide architectural leadership and technical direction across complex, multi-domain platforms. This role is primarily strategic and advisory, focused on defining sound architectures, guiding engineering decisions, and ensuring systems evolve in a scalable, secure, and sustainable way as they mature. While early engagements or greenfield systems may require deeper technical involvement, the long-term focus of this role is architecture ownership rather than day-to-day coding. Success in this role depends on a strong ability to understand, read, and reason about code; deep expertise in cloud infrastructure (particularly Azure or similar platforms); and the credibility to guide highly capable engineering teams without formal authority. This role bridges pre-sales and delivery, ensuring the solutions we commit to clients are architecturally sound, feasible, and aligned with long-term technology strategy. You will work closely with Sales, Engineering, Product, and Leadership to shape solution approaches, influence system evolution, and raise overall technical maturity across the organization.

Responsibilities

Define and Develop Architectural Strategy:

• Create detailed architecture blueprints, system designs, and long-term technical roadmaps.
• Establish architectural standards, best practices, and reference patterns.
• Design scalable, reliable, and secure distributed systems and integrations.
• Evaluate trade-offs between scalability, security, cost, performance, and maintainability.
• Define long-term system evolution and modernization strategies.
• Act as the primary architectural authority, guiding technical direction across mature and evolving systems.

Cloud & Infrastructure Leadership:

• Architect and optimize cloud or hybrid infrastructures, including networking, IAM/RBAC, compute, storage, monitoring, and security.
• Define best practices for resource organization, security posture, governance, and cost optimization.
• Ensure high availability, disaster recovery, resilience, and scalable configurations.
• Guide Infrastructure-as-Code and automation strategies (e.g., Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation, Pulumi, native IaC tools).
• Provide deep architectural expertise in cloud platforms, serving as an escalation point for complex infrastructure decisions.

DevOps, Automation & Delivery Enablement:

• Lead adoption and optimization of DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines.
• Define deployment strategies, release workflows, and environment management.
• Promote automation, performance monitoring, observability, and operational excellence.
• Support engineering teams in debugging, incident resolution, and performance improvements, primarily from an architectural and systems-level perspective.

Hands-On Technical Contribution:

• Remain hands-on as needed during early-stage engagements, greenfield initiatives, or architectural inflection points.
• Contribute selectively to architecture-critical code components, prototypes, or proofs of concept.
• Participate in code reviews, design reviews, and complex technical troubleshooting.
• Support performance tuning, optimization, and architectural refactoring.
• Validate the feasibility of architectural designs through hands-on collaboration and strong code literacy, rather than sustained feature development.

Pre-Sales & Delivery Transition:

• Partner with Sales and Customer Success during the pre-sales cycle to assess technical feasibility, shape solution approaches, and validate delivery commitments before contract close.
• Participate in discovery conversations and proposal development, acting as the technical voice in client-facing discussions.
• Ensure a clean handoff into delivery by carrying full context from pre-sales into Sprint 0, eliminating the cold-start problem for new engagements.
• Ensure architectural decisions made during pre-sales align with long-term platform and delivery realities.

AI & Emerging Technology Enablement:

• Evaluate emerging technologies and propose how they support architectural evolution.
• Support integration of AI/ML capabilities where applicable.
• Assess technical implications, constraints, and opportunities created by modern architectural approaches (e.g., event-driven systems, workflow orchestration, automation frameworks).

Team, Culture & Technical Maturity:

• Identify capability gaps and opportunities for engineering growth.
• Mentor and guide engineers and technical leads to elevate technical excellence and architectural thinking.
• Foster best practices, technical quality, and continuous improvement.
• Influence decision-making through expertise, credibility, and strong communication without relying on formal authority.
• Guide teams toward sound architectural decisions while respecting the strength and autonomy of senior engineers.

Technical Skills:

• 12+ years of professional experience in software engineering, with at least 5 years in architecture-focused roles.
• Proven experience designing and evolving distributed systems in production.
• Strong understanding of system design fundamentals, including:

• REST APIs and service-oriented architectures.
• EDD, TDD, Clean Architecture and SOLID.
• Messages, Queues, Bus and Event Management Systems.
• SQL, Data models and Databases.
• Knowledge about IaC (Infrastructure as Code) and PaaS (Platform as a Service).
• Security, governance, observability, and resilience.

• Ability to read, understand, and reason about complex codebases across multiple technologies.
• Experience guiding architectural decisions for large-scale or mission-critical systems.
• Strong familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and modern cloud platforms (Any).

Soft Skills:

• Strong architectural judgment and ability to set technical direction.
• Systems-thinking mindset with a pragmatic, delivery-aware approach.
• Excellent communication across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• High sense of ownership and comfort operating in evolving environments.
• Ability to guide and influence senior engineers without direct authority.
• Curiosity and openness to emerging technologies and new approaches.

Bonus Skills:

• Experience modernizing legacy systems or evolving mature platforms.
• Exposure to cloud-native, containerized, or microservices architectures.
• Experience with workflow orchestration or event-driven platforms.
• AI/ML integration experience or familiarity with modern AI frameworks.
• Cloud or architecture-related certifications.

* We put people first at Upstart 13! We believe the world is filled with amazing people and we are willing to go to great lengths to seek out others who share our values to join our cause of bringing down borders in technology for people everywhere. * We develop leaders at Upstart 13, we focus on what matters to do meaningful work, we own our shit, we stay curious, and we understand responsibility leads to giving. We do big things together!